So we gave in.....

After three years of home and land ownership we gave in. We paid someone to do our yard work.

In the end, it was an easy decision. Weeds and bushes, interspersed with poison ivy, had overwhelmed swaths of our backyard. For a not-insane amount of money we could pay a crew to clean our entire yard in a couple of days. They divided the work estimate by sections of our yard. Front center. Front right. Back right. Back center, fence line. Back of the house. Left side, from front to back. We agreed to have everything cleared except the left side, since we aren't sure where our property line is and are too lazy to check it with the county.

They mostly worked during the day when we were out of the house - which is just as well so that we didn't have to endure the noise, or feel guilty that we had finally given in and were not out there doing the work ourselves. We did catch them in action once or twice:

It's hard to capture the difference in before/after shots because we deliberately had them leave each area a little wild. Dealing with some ivy (English, not poison) and Japanese spurge (which I learned from our landscapers is more commonly known as pachysandra) is better than dealing with bare dirt and mud. And we already know our track record for getting grass to grow, so we though it was better not to tempt fate and clear out the entire area in the hopes of expanding the grass part of our lawn  - especially into a shady, low-lying section prone to accumulating standing water.

So without further ado - here's the bag corner of our yard, the messiest part, before:

(Note that we still never got around to chopping up the last of the little tree we took down last spring.)

 And after

Besides chopping up the rest of the trunk, they seriously cleaned out all the undergrowth, trimmed back the out-of-control azalea bushes, and removed poison ivy and tiny saplings. Now we can actually see the little brick oven from the house.

The back fence line, before:

And after:

Huge improvement - not just from trimming back the low branches on the tree but clearing out all the junk (while keeping some healthy looking plants like hostas). Again, we asked them to keep it a little wild - and keep the ivy on the chain-link fence - for some privacy from our neighbors.

Here's the back of the house, before:

Even though we cleared around the air conditioner every spring, the wild ivy and plants grew back by mid-summer.

But now they won't, since the landscapers pulled all that junk away:

(The hosta always looks a little unwell by fall - it will perk up next spring and do a marvelous job of hiding the AC unit.)

Before

Our yard certainly isn't a manicured beauty, but it'll be easier to spruce up this spring. Especially since now we can actually walk into the more "wild" portions of our yard and do some additional clean-up ourselves. It had gotten so overgrown (and filled with poison ivy) that we didn't even know where to begin before.